Semidefinite Programming based Resource
Allocation for Energy Consumption Minimization
in Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks
Yueyue Zhang
∗
, Yaping Zhu
∗
, Feng Yan
∗
, Zhengquan Li
∗†
, and Lianfeng Shen
∗
∗
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210096, P. R. China
†
College of Internet of Things Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, 214122, China
Email:{douleyue, xyzzyp, feng.yan, lfshen}@seu.edu.cn, lzq722@sina.com
Abstract—In this paper, one centralized resource allocation
algorithm is proposed to minimize energy consumption in soft-
ware defined wireless sensor networks (SD-WSNs). The energy
consumption problem is formulated as an optimization problem,
given quality-of-service (QoS) constraint defined as Signal-to-
Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR). Then, the nonconvex op-
timization problem is relaxed into a semidefinite programming
(SDP), which serves as a lower bound. To analyze the tightness of
the lower bound, two special cases are introduced. Besides, one
distributed approach is also developed to provide a performance
benchmark. Furthermore, simulation results are revealed that the
proposed centralized algorithm performances better with respect
to the energy consumption and bandwidth utilization.
Index Terms—resource allocation, software defined wireless
sensor networks (SD-WSNs), semidefinite programming (SDP)
I. INTRODUCTION
Software defined networking (SDN) has been a promising
system architecture and control mechanism for future networks
[1]. And the spirit of SDN has been adopted in wireless
domain, for instance, software-defined cognitive radio net-
work [2], software-defined cellular networks [3] and software-
defined VANET [4].
Recent improvement in circuits and wireless communica-
tion technologies makes wireless sensor networks (WSNs)
programmable by integrating signal processing blocks and
other interfaces into a small wireless device. Accordingly,
various researches have been explored to introduce SDN into
WSNs [5], [6]. [5] has proposed software defined WSNs (SD-
WSNs) with Sensor OpenFlow, which synergizes SDN and
WSNs to solve WSN-inherent problems, such as, resource
underutilization, rigid policy changes, and hard management.
In [6], a novel base station architecture realizing SD-WSNs
controller function has been developed, which could help in
tackling several difficult problems in WSNs including energy
saving and network management.
Due to the nature of energy-constrained, sensors in WSNs
are needed to operate without battery replacement or harvested
This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (No. 61471164, 61171081, 61571108) and the Research Fund of
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University
(No. 2016B02)
energy for a long period. In [7], some key design consider-
ations have been addressed for future micro sensor systems,
for example, network protocols, low energy electronics, and
energy harvesting techniques. Besides, optimized modulations
have been studied with the energy constrains when transmit-
ting given number of bits in point-to-point communication [8].
And in [9], minimal energy consumption in WSNs has been
considered in the overall network.
Although some preliminary researches have been done on
SD-WSNs, there seems no resource allocation in SD-WSNs
to reduce energy consumption with the global information
of the whole network. Given QoS constraints, we exploit
resource allocation (power and bandwidth) to minimize energy
consumption in SD-WSNs, which decouples the control logic
from data forwarding. Thus, the information gathered from
sensors will be uploaded to the control plane and could be
processed with a global view of the network.
The energy consumption minimization problem can be
formulate as an optimization problem. However, the non-
convexity makes the search for the global optima hard. Recent-
ly, the semidefinite relaxation technique has been studied in
several work [10], [11], which basic idea is to relax the original
non-convex problem into an semidefinite programming (SDP).
By taking advantage of the convex optimization technique,
the global minimum of a convex problem can be quickly and
efficiently found [10].
Motivated by the above, we propose an SDP-based cen-
tralized algorithm specifically for the energy consumption
problem in SD-WSNs. Since the original problem is relaxed
into an SDP, it serves as a lower bound , which global optimal
power and bandwidth allocation can be readily obtained.
Besides, the tightness of the lower bound is analyzed by two
proposed special cases. Moreover, an alternative distributed
approach is developed to provide a performance benchmark
of the centralized one.
II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM
FORMULATION
A. SD-WSNs Architecture
As depicted in Fig. 1, an SD-WSNs architecture is mainly
divided into two planes, control plane and data plane. In the
control plane, the SDN controllers (SDN-Cs) equipped with
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